Esther Ferrer

Born in 1937 in San Sebastian, Spain.
Lives and works in Paris, France.
Esther Ferrer is chiefly know for her performances, her main form of
expression, alone or in the group Zaj created by Juan Hidalgo, Walter
Marchetti and Ramon Barce, from 1967 until its dissolution in 1996.
Her work has always been more orientated towards art/action, an
ephemeral practice, rather than towards art/production. That was how she
founded with J. A. Sistiaga, in the Spain of the early sixties, the
first “Atelier de libre expression” (Free expression workshop).
From the seventies onward, she has devoted part of her activity to the
visual arts: worked-over photographs, objects, models, installations and
paintings based on the series of prime numbers. Her work is inscribed
within a very specific minimalism that could be defined as the “rigor of
the absurd”. She says, but only when asked, that every performance is
the “art of space, time and presence”.
She represented Spain in the Venice Biennale in 1999, and was awarded
three prizes in Spain: the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in 2008
(National Prize for Visual Arts), the Premio Gure Artea in 2012 (Basque
country) and in 2014, the Premio MAV - Mujeres en las Artes Visuales
(Women in the Visual Arts).
Recently, two retrospectives were shown successively in France: in the
Frac Bretagne in Rennes, from January through April, 2013 Le chemin se fait en marchant / face A and in the Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine from February through July, 2014 Face B. Image / Autoportrait.
Following those two exhibitions, a monographic work, the first in
French (and in English), retracing her performances and her
installations, was published jointly with the Frac Bretagne and the
Mac/Val.